The absurdity of Ishmael
When I was in high school, the science teacher made us read a book called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, about a telepathic gorilla talking with humans about the environment. I realized that the big message of the book was that humans affecting the environment in any way equaled damage. I called it out in my book report.
If we took the book’s idea ad absurdum, humans not only should not have built civilization, but they should not have hunted for food, nor even discovered fire, built shelter, nor made clothing. The author likely believes that the earth would be better off without humans in it.
It was ridiculous. We have to allow for some impact. Destroying humanity is not an option, however much Bill Gates may have advocated for that position. I definitely won’t cooperate.
Somehow, of all creatures on the earth, they singled out human beings as an aberration, despite their beliefs in Darwinism and the rest. To be intellectually consistent with Darwinism, they should have said that humans are, like animals, part of nature. Therefore, on their principle of allowing nature to take its course, we should stand back and delight in what humanity will do, the way they would have us do for the rest of nature! I personally would prefer they believe that and leave us alone.
The Bible’s mission for humanity
However, G.d’s law overrules both their ideas and my preferences. We humans are not supposed to leave nature alone. The Bible tells us that G.d commanded humanity to “fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28). We are to “rule over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the sky and the living creatures that crawl on the earth.” To Adam He later clarified, “to work [the garden] and to guard it” (2:15). We are supposed to tame the wilderness, not let the wilderness take over. We are supposed to make the world a garden, not let it fall to ruin or destroy it.
G.d wants an ordered world settled by human beings. That is the big idea of the Noahide Laws.
That is also why, all else being equal, human settlement (“yishuv ha’aretz”) is given halachic precedence over other property interests.[1]
Water and energy consumption
Naturally, that means we should be responsible with our resources and environment, and be principled. Also we must not irrationally ban simple usage of resources - that leads us to compromising our moral principles for the sake of unsavory actors in the world like Iran who immorally control those same resources elsewhere and spread violence throughout the world.
In the face of immoral forces like China, I even wonder if any environmental friction against datacenters is justified, since in the grand scheme of things (and morally according the Noahide Laws) it’s worse for the world for militantly secularist China to be in charge than America, the guardian of “In G.d we trust.”
For example, there is a procedure often translated as the Right of First Refusal, which exists in real estate contracts even among Gentiles today. In short, when a non-neighbor purchaser offers a price for a piece of land, the neighbor is given the chance to pay that offer price to displace the purchaser, by buying the land himself.
However, if the purchaser plans to build houses and the neighbor plans only to seed it for agriculture, the one who plans to build human habitation is given preference (Hil. Shecheinim 14:1).
This privilege of the "bar metzra" (neighbor) was rabbinically established in Bava Metzia 108a based on Deut. 6:18, "You shall do what is right and good in the eyes of the L.rd." The reasoning of the bar metzra privilege is that a neighbor stands to benefit specially from having contiguous tracts of land, while to the non-neighbor, if this property were some other isolated place, he would not mind; in fact, many other such properties exist. But if he were to purchase the land, the neighbor would lose out on his interest to this particular piece of land. It's not fair to him.
Nevertheless, to settle the land with people takes priority over that interest.
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